Significant Others

Creativity and Intimate Partnership

Whitney Chadwick, Isabelle de Courtivron

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780500774144
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Biographies of artists and writers have traditionally presented an individuals lone struggle for self-expression. In this book, critics and historians challenge these assumptions in a series of essays that focus on artist and writer couples who have shared sexual and artistic bonds. Featuring duos such as Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, this book combines biography with evaluation of each partners work in the context of the relationship.

Notes and Sources

AAA = Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

INTRODUCTION

Notes

1.In Western culture, individuality and uniqueness are central to evaluations of art, as well as life. Psychoanalysts, literary critics, and cultural historians have all analyzed the importance of the notion of individuality, and the particular role of the artist as the embodiment of free will, however illusory in Western societies; with regard to the artist, see for example Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” repr. in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 293–313. The work of psychoanalytic and feminist theorist Nancy Chodorow explores the ways that gender is constructed around identifications with separateness (masculinity) and connectedness (femininity); see her The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990). French philosopher Luce Irigaray has argued that the cultural values that speak another language, a language of nearness, plurality, and diversity, are simply erased by the cultural hegemony of phallocentrism; see her Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

2.Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley, eds., Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1984).

3.Shari Benstock, “Afterword to Neice Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood,” Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern Marriage, 1899–1944 (New York: The Feminist Press, 1991).

4.Simone de Beauvoir endorsed this conclusion in her own autobiographical statements, as well as in The Second Sex, her groundbreaking study of woman’s lot under patriarchy. Unlike Sartre, she stated over and over again, she was not a philosopher; she had not “erected” a system; see The Second Sex, trans. H. N. Parshley (New York: Bantam Books, 1952); Margaret A. Simons, “Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir,” in Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky, eds., Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

5.Nancy Huston, Journal de la creation (Paris: Seuil, 1990); see also Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 371–96.

6.Quoted in Anne M. Wagner, “Lee Krasner as L.K.,” in Representations, 25 (Winter 1989), p. 42.

1 CLAUDEL AND RODIN

Notes

1.Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), p. 95.

2.Perseus Triumphant literally took the place of what was probably at the time the single most revered sculpture of Classical antiquity, the Apollo Belvedere. After Napoleon took the figure so acclaimed by Winckelmann and others to the Louvre as part of his war spoils, the Perseus, already underway, was chosen to take over Apollo’s crucial role in the Vatican collection.

3.Grunfeld, p. 86.

4.Ibid., p. 130.

5.Ibid., p. 159.

6.Ovid, The Metamorphoses, ed. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1958), pp. 116–17.

7.Reine-Marie Paris, Camille Claudel (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 44.

8.Ibid., p. 212.

9.Ibid., p. 211.

10.Grunfeld, p. 82.

11.Anne Wagner, “Rodin’s Reputation,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 191–242.

12.Ibid., p. 191.

13.Ibid., p. 198.

14.Quoted in Elizabeth Chase Gusbahler, Rodin’s Later Drawings (Boston: Beacon, 1963), p. 31.

15.Wagner, p. 227.

16.Ibid., p. 229; see also pp. 233 and 235.

17.Ibid., p. 235; see also pp. 229–34.

18.Paris, p. 22.

19.Claudine Mitchell, “Intellectuality and Sexuality: Camille Claudel, The Fin de Siècle Sculptress,” Art History, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1989), p. 437.

20.Ibid., p. 4...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Introduction: Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron
• Myths of Creation: Camille Claudel & Auguste Rodin
• Living Simultaneously: Sonia & Robert Delaunay
• Of First Wives and Solitary Heroes: Clara & André Malraux
• The “Left-Handed Marriage”: Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant
• “Tinder-And-Flint”: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West
• The Bird Superior Meets The Bride Of The Wind: Leonora Carrington & Max Ernst
• Beauty To His Beast: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera
• Separate Studios: Kay Sage & Yves Tanguy
• The Literate Passion of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller
• Non-Negotiable Bonds: Lillian Hellman & Dashiell Hammett
• The Art of Code: Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg
• Significantly Other: Simone & André Schwarz-Bart
• Fictions: Krasner’s Presence, Pollock’s Absence
• Notes and Selected Sources
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index
• Copyright